Ape Mind Transcripts

While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control.

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting standards that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took those guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

Matt Tabbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman-Sachs, “The Great American Bubble Machine (PDF),” is just as frustrating as advertised. The U.S. economy comes off as a big confidence game, rigged to the benefit of insiders and lacking any consequences for its momentous failures.

Instead of improving the situation, Obama seems to be further entrenching the status quo.

“We haven’t gone four weeks since February without some poor guy — always with a long history of mental illness, usually with a record of military service and/or domestic violence, and invariably jacked up on a toxic cocktail of white male privilege; us-versus-them enemy seeking; fury at women, blacks and/or Jews; and a belief that the world as he knew it was ending unless he took up arms — taking out his gun and offing innocent Americans in a suicidal bid for glory.”

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has a tally of far-right murders since the election, analyzing the cultural factors motivating this type of violence. I think her conclusion is alarmist, but it’s extremely concerning to connect the dots.